Why “Animal (De)liberation” survives early criticism and is pivotal to public health

Abstract

SummaryIn 2016, the book Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned? was published. This article aims to engage with the critique that this book has received and to clarify and reinforce its importance for human health. It is argued that the ideas developed in the book withstand critical scrutiny. As qualified moral veganism avoids the pitfalls of other moral positions on human diets, public health policies must be altered accordingly, subject to adequate political support for its associated vegan project.

Reasoning, evidence, and clinical decision‐making: The great debate moves forward

“…This section opens with a characteristically timely response on the part of Deckers 43 to the review that concluded our previous section. He accepts the criticism that he does not provide enough detail on what a qualified ban on the consumption of animal products might look like, a limitation he attributes to a number of factors, including "the complex business of evaluating the GHIs, for example the environmental costs and benefits of actual and potential diets."…”

“…This section opens with a characteristically timely response on the part of Deckers to the review that concluded our previous section. He accepts the criticism that he does not provide enough detail on what a qualified ban on the consumption of animal products might look like, a limitation he attributes to a number of factors, including “the complex business of evaluating the GHIs, for example the environmental costs and benefits of actual and potential diets.” However, he states that as “more people take the key question addressed by the book seriously, it is my hope that further studies and value discussions will refine GHI calculations.” His article addresses several other criticisms levelled by Laestadius and other commentators, including his moral endorsement of a version of “speciesism” and the prioritization of human health—positions that might seem to place him at odds with many other advocates of veganism, most notably Singer .…”

“…In this edition, we present an array of up‐to‐date analyses of the problems of reason in practice, addressing a diverse range of healthcare contexts and methods, considering policy decisions as well as specific instances of clinical reasoning . Contributors discuss the nature of practical wisdom, the relationship between reasoning, emotion, intuition, and evidence, and the sense in which EBM is (or is not) a “modern” scientific enterprise, in the light of considerations of the relationship between science, context, and culture .…”

“…[29][30][31][32][33][34][35] The growing interest in medical and health philosophy is illustrated by the number of important texts currently being published in this area, and we present reviews of some of the most recent work in this field. [36][37][38][39][40][41][42] The edition concludes with an extensive debates section, where arguments presented in this and in previous editions are challenged by respondents, [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] in ways that we hope will further illustrate how underlying philosophical commitments can make a substantive difference to our understanding of the right ways to approach and improve practice.…”

9. Richard Haynes and the views of professionals in the animal welfare science community

“…Those who adopt this ontology may recognise more clearly that sentient beings must kill other sentient beings to sustain themselves. As I have argued in detail elsewhere, the question which sentient beings should be allowed to be killed should be settled not only by taking account of differences in sentient capacities, but also by the degree to which a being is related to a human being, an extension of speciesism that has been labelled as evolutionism (Deckers, 2017;Paez, 2017). Whilst this theory has been subjected to critical scrutiny by other scholars and has its own problems (Laestadius, 2017;Mancilla, 2016;Paez, 2017), it provides a superior account of animal ethics to that developed by Haynes.…”